


No Regrets

by Heather



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Missing Scenes, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-22
Updated: 2016-08-22
Packaged: 2018-08-10 03:54:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7829494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heather/pseuds/Heather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She receives fifty text messages in under seven minutes when the bombs go off in Vienna.</p><p>Five thousand miles apart, not currently speaking, and not technically more involved than as company owner and CEO, and Pepper's still the first point of contact people think of when the world wants to know, <i>Is Tony Stark okay?</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	No Regrets

**Author's Note:**

> For #15

She receives fifty text messages in under seven minutes when the bombs go off in Vienna.

Five thousand miles apart, not currently speaking, and not technically more involved than as company owner and CEO, and Pepper's still the first point of contact people think of when the world wants to know, _Is Tony Stark okay?_

Pepper thinks that question might best be answered by a crack team of psychologists, but she sends her own text to Natasha, who is better placed than she to confirm that he's still breathing. Or so she thinks, until the reply comes, with a feeling of either confusion or judgment on Natasha's end: _Stark's not even here._

Three weeks ago, Pepper would have known that. Almost any other time in the last _eighteen years_ , she would have known that, and for a moment, she has to shake off a brief reflex sensation of falling down on the job. 

She sends a short missive to the interns who run the company Facebook to make the announcement that rumors of Tony Stark's death are premature and unfounded, another to the press coordinator to write their statement of shock and sympathy, and another to her own assistant to stop by her apartment to have an appropriately somber outfit ready for her inevitable television appearance.

Life, death, pick up dry cleaning. Just another day. Sometimes, it's easy for Pepper to remember why she was getting tired of all of this. 

Against her better judgment, Pepper sends out one more text, to Tony himself: _I'm glad you're okay._

His answer comes quick and cutting, like he's upset and taking it out on her. _Nice to know you care._

It's a mark of how she feels about Tony and their relationship right now that she is equally torn between replying _Fuck you_ and _Of course I care._

She chooses instead to return to her previous strategy of not replying at all.

It's not her job anymore.

\---

_1998_

Pepper isn't sure what she had been expecting Tony Stark's office to be like, but she is sure that she hadn't expected it to have a full bar and a dozen gadgets that probably cost more than her parents' house just lying around. 

She's not an idiot; she follows the news, she knows who he is, and she looked up everything about him that she possibly could before she came down here. But she had thought that surely at least some of that was just an act. Pepper grew up in Silicon Valley, she's met tech geniuses before, and as cool and sexy as people try to make the job out to be, most people she's met with a real gift for the job have not been very exciting. It's hard to stay up all night writing code that will completely revolutionize how people work and play for the next ten years if you're just barely squeezing it in between keggers and super models, and Pepper has taken it for granted that Tony was just another wunderkind who wanted to seem more fun and interesting than he was. 

She'd think the office was part of the act, too, but there are dirty glasses in the wet bar sink, and several bottles have been visibly more well-loved than others. Pepper makes a mental note that her possible future boss prefers vodka to scotch, and makes the further mental leap from the half-empty olive jar and gigantic collection of toothpicks that he's a martini man.

He keeps her waiting for nearly twenty minutes past her appointed interview time before he finally shows up, suit rumpled from collar to legs, and the traces of someone else's lipstick lingering on his mouth, forcing the conclusion that either Tony Stark is a quick-changing transvestite, or the billionaire playboy routine is not only _not_ an act, but in fact somewhat downplayed in the media to keep the shareholders from panicking over his lack of professionalism.

Rather than make Pepper worry about her future career, she feels a swell of optimism at her chances. His dire need for someone to organize his life is written in every wrinkle of his five hundred dollar shirt.

"So, Miss..." He shuffles through several files lying haphazard on his desk for the ones his human resource department sent up for his review to try to remind himself of her name.

"Potts," she says, and Pepper saves him any further trouble by handing him her own file folder containing her resumé, cover letter, and references.

"Miss Potts." Tony looks a little grateful and a lot amused as he takes it from her, flipping it open to skim. "Virginia," he reads aloud, quirking an eyebrow like he can't believe that anyone born after 1935 might answer to that name. "What do I call you? Virgie? Ginny?"

She refuses to be embarrassed by her own name, and looks at him with a somewhat defiant lift of her chin. "Pepper, actually."

"Pepper," he says, and that incredulous lift of his eyebrow becomes that much more pointed. "Your parents really just gave you no chance at all, did they?"

She's used to this comment and worse, so she smiles at him until he starts to look mortified at himself for picking such low-hanging fruit. Pepper already suspects that he's not in the habit of being mortified about anything he says, no matter how rude or off-putting, so she takes it as a win.

"Sure, okay," he says, then tosses her file folder on his desk like there's nothing else in it that could possibly be of interest to him. "So, _Miss Potts_." He leans back in his chair, props his feet on the desk, and steeples his fingers under his chin like a hyperactive version of a Bond villain. "Why do you want the job?"

Pepper discards every answer she had prepared for this question in advance, already certain that Tony is not impressed by the well-mannered or by polished professionalism, that what he is looking for in candidates that he will have to spend a great deal of time with is the exceptional. Namely, the ability to keep up with him. She gives him an icy smile and asks, "Why would I want to work for a top Fortune 500 company, directly underneath one of the richest and most famous men in the world?"

"Don't forget smartest, most handsome, and number one three years running on Player magazine's list of Dudes To Hang Out With," Tony says, matter of fact, as though these might well be considered fringe benefits that she would have to include as part of her gross earnings on her income taxes.

"Who could ever?" she asks, with a brief gesture at their surroundings. 

"Everyone I've ever had working in accounting."

"Do you spend much time with your accounting department?"

"As little as possible."

"Then it's good I'm not applying to be an accountant."

For the first time since they met, Tony smiles at her. He points his fingers at her, gun-shaped for emphasis, as he swings his legs off the desk and stands up. "I think I like you, Miss Potts."

"Thank you," she says, gathering her things as she starts to stand, too.

"Don't get up," he says, and it turns out that his intended destination was his office's wet bar. He grabs two martini glasses and begins mixing.

Pepper sits back down. "Does this job involve a lot of day drinking?"

"Not expected," he says, pouring the glasses. "But it is encouraged." He spears a pair of olives on toothpicks and drops one into each glass, hands her one, and returns to his seat.

Pepper isn't a day drinker, let alone in the workplace, but she sips it anyway. She can work out not enabling him once she actually has the job. "So what else does it involve?"

"Simple enough," Tony says, draining half his glass in an undignified single swallow. "You'll be doing all the boring parts of my life so I don't have to."

"Mm." Pepper quirks her own eyebrows skeptically. "And what do you consider to be the boring parts, Mr. Stark?"

"Tony," he says. He leans back in his seat again and looks like just describing this is too tedious to be borne. "Schedules, meetings, notes, people's names."

Against her will, she smiles. "I would've thought a genius could keep track of all that."

"Best part of being a genius is figuring out that you don't have to. Work smart, not hard." The look he gives her is meant to be apologetic, save for the part where he's obviously not that sorry. "Unless you're you. You'll be working hard."

"I was getting that impression," she says. "Will be?"

Tony waves that away as a small thing of no consequence. "Oh, you've got the job," he says. "You sat here for twenty minutes without complaining. Had the feeling I owed you."

"You don't want to review my references or qualifications?" she asks, sure that she already knows the answer.

"No, that's the boring stuff you do," he says. "Effective immediately. Go see human resources. They'll set you up with a badge, a car, and an expense account."

"Right now?" Pepper asks, blinking in surprise. 

"Yeah," Tony says, as though that should have been obvious. "You've got work to do."

"I wasn't planning to meet the rest of the building with vodka on my breath," she says, a little peevish. 

Tony waves this away, too. "They're used to it."

Yay, she thinks. Oh, well. "Well. Thank you for the opportunity. You won't regret it."

"I never regret anything," he says. "Welcome aboard, Miss Potts."

"Good to be aboard, Mr. Stark."

He clinks her glass with his, gives her two minutes to finish the drink, then sends her out to run his life for him.

\---

It takes two days for Tony to end up in the news again.

Pepper realizes that she should be used to this, that Tony's been ending up in the news three times a week or more for the last eight years, and in her way, she is; she's not even surprised when she turns the TV on and sees the headline _Captain America arrested in Bucharest._ (Well. A little surprised. Had Pepper been asked to speculate on which of the Avengers other than Tony would set about making her life more difficult after breaking up with him, Pepper would not have put her money on Steve. She'd had an imaginary sum in her head riding on Thor.)

It's only that it seems unfair for there to be a crowd of reporters clustered around her condo's door, dying to ask her about how Tony's dealing with arresting his "best friend", when she hasn't even had coffee yet and she doesn't know the answer.

Probably furious, though. Pepper can't remember a time in the last four years that Tony hasn't been furious at Steve, like a younger brother resenting Dad's blatant favoritism of the elder.

"Not my problem," she says out loud- to the TV, to her coffee cup, to any reporter that is able to hear her through her door and over the voices of his fellows shouting her name.

\---

_2008_

Pepper has spent ten years trying, in her head, to develop a means of coping with it when Tony says things that are frustrating, unreasonable, and in a few memorable cases, demonstrably insane. Gawking at him slack-jawed with a pounding sensation building behind her right eye has been the most regular, if not the most helpful. 

She manages to keep it in check as far as the Stark Industries jet before bursting out at him, "Did you really just do that?"

Tony is already helping himself to the plane's bar, making a vodka tonic with one hand while tossing peanuts in the air with the other, catching each one in his mouth with an unself-conscious joy that puts Pepper in mind of a dog. She doesn't think she's ever seen him this pleased with himself. He swallows a peanut, and has the gall to look at her with confused innocence. "What?" The pounding in her eye must be unusually visible, because he adds, rapid-fire and nonchalant, "Oh, you mean the coming clean with the American people about who I am, what I did, and why I did it, instead of going along with the yacht story?"

She narrows her eyes. "First of all, you did not do any of that. You said, 'I am Iron Man,' and walked out, like some kind of slam poet--"

Tony begins talking over her. "No one ever said that full honesty meant minute-detailed honesty--"

She pitches her voice to be louder, even as they begin to overlap. "--second of all, you did the one thing- the one thing!- that the government asked you not to, when you personally have become a weapon of mass destruction--"

"--and it felt _insanely_ good, by the way--"

"--I think that might actually have counted as a confession that you can be prosecuted for--"

"--telling people you're a super hero might even feel better than being a super hero--"

"--and that I can probably be prosecuted for, in case that thought never entered your mind--"

"--and if slam poetry feels that good, then someone needed to tell me _years_ ago--"

Pepper makes a frustrated noise and gestures for silence.

To Tony's ever-dwindling line of credit, he gives it to her.

"I don't think you've thought through to the potential consequences of making that announcement," she says, with as much calmness as she can muster.

"Do I ever?" he asks, unrepentant. "It'll work itself out. I'm sure Agent Coulson will get over his disappointment that I've ruined his perfectly-crafted cover story." 

"It's not just him, Tony," she says. "There's a whole government that he answers to, that was already unhappy with you, and I don't know that this...Iron Man thing...is entirely legal."

Tony looks at her as though she's speaking a language he neither understands nor is impressed by. "What's the worst that could happen?"

"I don't know," Pepper says. "One of the first things you should've done before telling the world about this is finding that out."

He lets out a disdainful scoff. "I stopped a very bad man from possibly taking over the world," he says. "Or at least, the arms dealing part of it. I'm not real sure where he was going with his cheap knockoff plan, after the killing me part, but I bet it would have been bad."

The pounding intensifies. "Tony..."

"What?"

This, too, he'll probably be confused and unimpressed by, but she plunges ahead, anyway. "Aren't you at least concerned that someone might find you responsible for some of the collateral damage the Iron Man fights have had?"

"Do you think I'm responsible?"

Pepper stops, feeling brought up short. "What?"

"Do you think I'm responsible?" he asks again, sipping his drink. "For the damage Stane did? For the damage those bastards did in Gulmira?"

This question is not rhetorical, Pepper knows. He's not asking her to prove a point or to undermine her concerns. Tony wants to know, in that hidden vulnerability way that he always wants to know, if Pepper disapproves of what he's done. And by extension, if she disapproves of Tony himself.

It's against her better judgment that she admits, "No."

Tension she didn't even know was there until it was gone disappears from Tony's neck and shoulders. He finishes his vodka tonic, catches another peanut in his mouth, and says, "Then the rest of it's not my problem."

She doesn't want it to, but it makes her smile.

\---

In the end, Pepper has to climb out her kitchen window to get away from the reporters.

She's half-surprised that it even worked. Whenever she's stayed at Tony's, they're usually better at covering every entrance and exit that they can find. She supposes that the media doesn't find her that interesting when Tony's not around.

Probably for the best. She'd have to have a personality like Tony's to live with that- which in his case often means to enjoy that- and she's not sure she's up to those levels of manic energy and binge-drinking, even after working directly under him for most of her adult life. 

Tony's definitely had more of an effect than she ever wanted him to as it is.

She climbs into her car, but doesn't start it. The noise might alert the reporters to her escape and then the race would be on. Instead, she collapses her seat as far backwards as it will go, lies back, and checks her phone. Some time since this whole circus started, Tony texted her.

_Not that arresting Captain America is the kind of thing most people would think is boring, but this is definitely the kind of thing in my life I wish you were here to do for me._

Pepper snorts. Before she can stop herself, she's given in to the impulse to text him back. _Nice to know you're thinking of me, I guess._

Rule number one with Tony Stark, the first rule she ever learned the day she met him, is that it's best not to let him goad her into the reactions he wants. Once Tony has found the button that will get him reactions, he will keep pressing it, like a child who wants to see how many phrases his new toy's voicebox was preprogrammed with. It's a rookie mistake and she knows better. 

He texts back near-instantly, _You think I don't think of you?_

No, she wants to say. As a matter of fact, I _don't_ think you think of me. As plainly evidenced by the sheer, improbable number of things you do that you know are going to stress me out, piss me off, scare me shitless, or put me in Goddamn danger. 

Sending that, however, would lead to a fight where Tony would want to go, point by point, over all the times he's put her above everyone and everything else in their lives- most of which, she would be forced to point out, were before he built the fucking suits. For such a whimsical person, Tony can be downright predictable.

She chews her lip and sends back, _You're the one who misses me cleaning up the mess._

She can see Tony's wounded face as clearly as if Wanda was here to project it into her mind. That would have cut. It would have _stung._

Fifteen minutes pass before he answers.

_I miss other things, too._

\---

_2008_

"You were dying."

The words lay between them, cold and withering.

"I'm not anymore," Tony tries, feebly, like he knows there's no way he can talk his way out of this. He was dying. He hid it from her. For the first time in his disconcertingly blunt life, the truth is not Tony's friend.

Pepper can feel her face twisting up against tears. She's mad as hell, and worried, and scared, and most of all, hurt. Tony had almost died. Not like the dozens of other times he had almost died, having surgery with a car battery in a cave or nearly being blown out of the sky, there and gone in an eyeblink. Something slow and possibly painful that he had lived with for months and never said a word. It's worse somehow than how reckless he is, how much danger he puts himself in. There had been a silent killer in his body, inches away from her breast when she hugged him, and he had never said a word.

It feels like a wall between them and Pepper doesn't know how she can even begin to climb it. Isn't even sure right now that she wants to. Unlike every other wall Tony puts up- the rudeness and the drinking and the daddy issues and the sarcasm and the blithe indifference to other people's feelings- Pepper hadn't even known it was there.

The problem with walls is that they're built to keep people out. And for the first time, Pepper believes that's what he was trying to do. With her specifically.

"I was going to tell you," Tony says.

Pepper just manages to say, through the lump in her throat, "Right. With omelets. You mentioned." The thought of an omelet has never made her so sick.

Tony's expression shifts, briefly, to his normal one of defensive, rambling sarcasm. "And then you kicked me out of your office to hang out with Agent Romanoff, the fake Latin speaker--"

The pained noise escapes her throat before she even knows she's making it. She reaches up to cover her mouth with both hands, as if she can catch another before it escapes, and before she knows it, the tears are well and truly flowing.

All the air seems to go out of Tony at once, and he looks at her, helpless. "Oh- please don't do that--"

"You were dying!" she snaps, angry even as the tears keep flowing. "And you didn't- you didn't think I needed to--"

Tony pulls her close. "I'm sorry. Pepper, I'm sorry. The next time it looks like I'm going south, I promise, you're the first one I'll call."

The next time. Because of course there will be a next time, and a next, and another after that. 

The tears keep coming, and Tony's still whispering promises and stroking her hair, kissing the tears off her cheeks. "Pepper. I need you. I love you. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

She's not sure of the moment he stops kissing her cheeks in favor of kissing her mouth, not sure when he stops stroking her hair to start caressing her shoulders, to reach for the buttons on her blouse. She's not sure why he chooses now to do it, and less sure why she chooses now to let him.

But it's good, it's so good, his hands on her breasts, his knee nudging her thighs apart while he pushes her into a wall.

"I love you," he says again, pulling his shirt over his head, the metal of the arc reactor warm through the fabric of her bra. "I love _nothing_ and _no one_ more than you."

For him, it's like showing her a weak spot where she can stab him. For her, it's like a Goddamn drug- a numbing narcotic being salved against the wound where he shut an emotional door against her face.

(It doesn't work, she knows. For the next eight years, every time she's hurting or angry, she remembers that the first thing she thought was that it doesn't work.

For most of the time, just like that night, she decides to go ahead.

Most of the time.)

Tony pushes up her skirt, pulls down her underwear until it hangs on one ankle, folded across his back. His fingers fumble for only a second or two at her clit before his cock slides inside.

"I love you," he says as he pushes up inside her, pressing her hard against the plaster. "I love you," he says with each and every thrust.

He says it to her when he comes, and again when she does, when he's on his knees with her wet against his face.

It's only when he falls asleep, face planted in her breasts as they curl on her couch, that she whispers, "I love you, too, Tony."

\---

She texts back, _Me too._

\---

Two days later, Rhodey's shot out of the sky.

Pepper wants to visit him in the hospital, but he's been released by the time she clears her workload and flies out to New York. She knows before she even lands where she's going to have to go.

"You didn't get rid of your key," Tony says, stunned when she opens the door.

"I brought pizza," Pepper answers back.

He lets her in while she puts the food down. She guesses he had the same idea, because she has to push three other pizza boxes out of the way. 

"Is he awake?" she asks.

"Not at the moment," Tony says. "The nerve damage was pretty bad. They gave him a lot of pills. I don't really--" He looks like he wants to discuss anything other than Rhodey's prognosis.

Pepper puts a hand up, forestalling. "This doesn't change anything," she says. "I'm still taking time. I'm still thinking this over. I just thought you might--" For a moment, she fumbles. "Might need a friend."

"Technically, Rhodey is a friend," he says.

"A less injured friend," she amends.

Tony smiles. "You didn't get rid of your key."

Pepper smiles back. "Don't read too much into it."


End file.
